METHOD PROVIDES VFX FOR BUD'S 'THE WAVE'

On one side of the stadium, fans uses their cards to create a Budweiser bottle, while on the other side, fans' cards form an empty glass. By doing the wave, they are able to seemingly pour beer into the glass half a stadium away.

Method used Massive Software, an artificial intelligence-based 3D animation system, to create the crowd of 97,000, an accomplishment considering only 300 extras were filmed on-set during the two-day shoot. The rest of the fans were all created in 3D.

"Massive's Stadium Agent had everything we needed," notes James Le Bloch, 3D artist at Method. "Randomness in the stock agent movement helped sell the work as a live crowd because we already had an agent that acted as a live crowd member would. It also gave us a lot of flexibility with the angles on our crowd shots."

Massive's software was also used to add spectators and football players to the stadium field.
The spot was conceived for Anheuser-Busch by DDB Chicago and was produced by H.S.I. Hal Honisberg of Chrome cut the commercial and Mike Pethel of Company 3 handled color correction. Elias handled audio post and Beacon Street provided sound design services.